4 comments:

Ivan, thanks for the links!!!I thought of creating a Pineapple Certified Religious Bovine Professional certification. What do you think? You can have PCRBP #00001.To be more democratic about it, I have created polls around these myths, based on the Mythbuster's methodology. They are called Redibusters:http://thinkingproblemmanagement.blogspot.com/search/label/Redibusters

I used to think that certifications were a useful indicator of knowledge or at least initiative, but I'm changing my mind. I interviewed a guy last week who had a whole pile of Cisco certifications (CCNP, CCSP, CCVP, CCDP, at least). I asked him some elementary questions about how packets flow across a network. He couldn't describe ARP. He had trouble with the difference between static and connected routes. He couldn't describe how a TCP handshake works at all. He couldn't accurately describe the the difference between a physical interface being up and a line protocol being up.

He then claimed to be much better at Cisco voice. So I asked him some basic CallManager and IOS voice gateway questions, and he completely flunked those. He was "absolutely, 100% certain" that MGCP controls phones, not gateways.

This was the most egregious example I've seen, but not the only one.

I feel like I've gotten a lot out of studying for certifications, especially CCIE, but I'm starting to wonder if that's the exception.

The author

Ivan Pepelnjak (CCIE#1354 Emeritus), Independent Network Architect at ipSpace.net, has been designing and implementing large-scale data communications networks as well as teaching and writing books about advanced internetworking technologies since 1990.